A Chat with Malcolm Brenner, Man Famous for Having Sex with a Dolphin

A few years back we published the anthology Everything You Know About Sex Is Wrong. One of the more challenging contributions was an interview with Clive Grace, an admitted zoophile. However, Grace’s bestial acts were confined to dogs and horses. Malcolm Brenner, on the other hand, went in for dolphins and tells Jezebel all about it:

Malcolm Brenner is the only man on Earth to achieve international fame for having sex with a dolphin. A former investigative journalist who covered the American Southwest, he remains best known for his 1970’s love affair—mostly romantic, briefly sexual—with a bottlenose dolphin named Dolly. Their “courtship,” which Brenner sees as dolphin-initiated and also transcendently romantic, took place in a theme park in Florida, the state where Brenner, now 63, currently lives. He chronicled these events in his autobiographical novel Wet Goddess, and Brenner’s story is the subject of a new short documentary called Dolphin Lover.

Malcolm Brenner by Thea Boodhoo (CC)

Watching Dolphin Lover, I was struck by the sincere, troubled and complicated intimacy with which Brenner recalls these events, which took place when he was only 19. About his first contact with Dolly, he says:

I started rubbing her forehead—she seemed to enjoy that—so I started rubbing her back, working my way down towards her tail, and as I was rubbing her, moving my hand towards her tail, Dolly started slowly rolling around her long axis. By the time I got midway down her body I was rubbing her belly instead of her back, and she swam forward so that I was rubbing her genital slit, and then she stopped moving. I thought, ‘This is embarrassing.’

About their eventual open-water sexual consummation—the dolphin had to be horizontal, him vertical; the CGI rendering in the film is really something—Brenner said it felt like he was “merging with her” into “one creature that was making love with himself.”